BENNINGTON — An educator from Arizona State University will become the next president of Bennington College, the small Vermont school that claims to be the first to include visual and performing arts as part of a liberal arts education.

Mariko Silver will succeed Elizabeth Coleman, who is retiring at the end of the month after 25 years at Bennington.

At Arizona State, Silver was a senior adviser to President Michael Crow. She designed and led campus, community, and international initiatives focused on student engagement and accomplishment on cutting-edge science, and on economic development.

Silver also served in the Obama administration as acting assistant secretary for International Affairs and deputy assistant secretary for international policy of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. She also served as a policy adviser to Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, with responsibility for the state’s public and private universities, community colleges, and vocational institutions.

Silver received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a doctorate in economic geography from the University of California at Los Angeles.

“She has an extraordinary intellectual and imaginative vitality, an outstanding track record, and a deep commitment to the College’s pedagogic traditions and values,” said Alan Kornberg, the chairman of the Bennington Board of Trustees. “Dr. Silver’s appointment also signals Bennington’s ambitions to expand the influence of the College’s founding ideals and contemporary practices in a world that is rapidly changing, that is simultaneously fragmented and interconnected, and that is, in every dimension, increasingly complex and global.”

During her years at Bennington Coleman oversaw the college’s greatest growth period in its history. The institution has raised more than $175 million and constructed six buildings in her 25 years and had an all-time high enrollment of nearly 700 undergraduates and 136 graduate students in the last academic year.